Re: The basics of beginning
Re: The basics of beginning
- Subject: Re: The basics of beginning
- From: Bryan Oakley <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 10:59:54 -0600
On Friday, February 14, 2003, at 08:29 AM, Robert Poland wrote:
Hi,
Forgive me if I don't know nuttin.
Everybody has to start somewhere.
I need to get into Unix at a low level. I have installed X11 0.2.1.
(iMac 800 512M ram, OS 10.2.4).... What is the point of X11? What does
it allow me to do?
I find it interesting you would download and install software for which
you have no idea what it does. For the record, you don't need X11 to
learn Unix "at a low level" (or at any level, for that matter). While
X11 has it's roots on unix systems, they are two different
technologies. X11 works on windows and macintosh and a few other
platforms as well. It is true, though, that most *nix systems use X11
as their display technology of choice (NeXT was one high profile
exception, in that it used display postscript), and a large percentage
of open source software requires X11.
X11 is a technology for managing graphical output. It allows you to
write programs that will run on any hardware that supports the X11
protocol. (X11 is a protocol, X11.app is a display server that
implements that protocol). The cool thing about X11 is that you can run
a program on one machine and have it display it's GUI on some other
machine or a smart terminal connected only by a network.
Installing and running X11.app allows you to run programs that were
built to use X11 as it's display technology. If you don't have
applications like that you don't need X11.
For the definitive answer on all things X11, see x.org:
http://www.x.org/X11.html
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